D.C. is making childcare more expensive without tangibly helping kids

"Just one more degree, bro. I swear, bro. It will work this time."

The nation’s capital of degree inflation persists.

Reason magazine is out with a short documentary on the new set of degree requirements for childcare workers in the District of Columbia. I recommend you go watch it. New rules mandate early childhood education bachelor’s degrees for childcare center directors, associate’s degrees for teachers, and certificates for assistant teachers.

I find this policy particularly frustrating for two reasons. First, I am a District resident who would like to raise children here. Driving up the cost of my future kids’ care will directly cost me money. Second, early childhood education policy advocates tend to get undue deference from the public, even when advocating for measures that will drive up families’ costs without clear benefits.

Here we have just such a policy. Saddling childcare workers with additional educational requirements will make care more expensive for D.C. families. Yet there is little reason to believe it will improve outcomes for the District’s kids.

D.C. childcare is the most expensive in America. Not coincidentally, families with young kids are leaving the city.

It is hardly an understatement to say the childcare market in Washington D.C. is in crisis. Center-based care for a single toddler in D.C. costs more than $24,000 per year, according to an analysis from the Annie E. Casey Foundation. In the closest state, Massachusetts, annual costs are $4,500 lower. For home-based care, the cost gap between the District and the most expensive state is $6,000.¹

In my work with the Economic Innovation Group, I regularly report on the geography of young families. In the early years of the pandemic, families with young kids left major cities in droves. D.C. was no exception. Between April 2020 and July 2022, the number of kids under five nationally fell 3.3 percent, as the country gradually continued to age. But in D.C., the population of young kids fell 7.8 percent over just 27 months, indicative of many young families heading elsewhere. The high cost of childcare in the District likely contributed to this exodus.

Pairing high childcare costs with a negative supply shock is a terrible idea.

Any negative supply shock, such as new regulations with which many current staff can’t comply, will only widen the cost gap between childcare in D.C. and the rest of the country. Surely the city will grandfather existing staff into new requirements, ensuring a smooth transition, right?

In 2022, Martin Austermuhle reported that fewer than half of care center teachers had met the new requirements, six years after they were first approved:

According to the D.C. Office of the State Superintendent of Education, which oversees and licenses child care centers and workers, 78% of directors of child care centers are now meeting their new educational requirement. The number is lower for teachers and assistant teachers, though, at 40% and 34% respectively, and around 50% for caregivers at home-based daycares. Still, an agency spokesman said everyone but directors have until Dec. 2023 to come into compliance, and that this year OSSE funded scholarships for 427 workers to get their Child Development Associate’s credential.

The city is scrambling merely to re-certify current childcare workers. Even those longtime teachers exempt from new rules are facing problems getting their waiver requests approved by the city. Reason highlights the story of one longtime childcare worker:

Ami Bawa, lead teacher and assistant director at a nursery school in northwest D.C., exemplifies the unintended consequences of the regulation. Although she has been working in the field for over 20 years, Bawa may now be forced out of her job. "Even though I have a lot of experiential learning, I don't meet what is now the current standard," she explains.

As a veteran teacher, Bawa is technically eligible to apply for a waiver to continue working, but she's been waiting for five months for a response from the city. "All of these roadblocks make it harder. We're going to lose a lot of really good teachers," Bawa says.

District parents have entrusted Bawa with their kids to provide quality care for two decades, relationships endangered by the city’s failure to process her paperwork on a reasonable timeline. The District will mandate new teachers spend two years obtaining an additional degree of questionable value but cannot itself give longtime teachers an hour to review their waiver applications.

The benefits of early childhood education are social, not academic. That’s bad news for childcare credentialing advocates.

Perhaps we could excuse saddling families with higher childcare costs or the city’s sloppy rollout if new rules were likely to yield great benefits to D.C. children. Unfortunately, we have little reason to believe requiring additional degrees will improve kids’ educational outcomes.

It is true that research finds early childhood education likely has positive, long-lasting effects on kids’ high school graduation rates, future criminality, and substance abuse. Importantly, it also increases the odds that kids ultimately graduate from college. Yet famously, the purely academic effects of the federal preschool program Head Start—measured by test scores—fade away entirely by the first or second grade. As Vox’s Kelsey Piper writes:

In the past few years, early childhood education has taken a beating in studies of its effects a few years down the road. The Department of Health and Human Services commissioned a massive study of Head Start, the flagship early childhood education program, and found “the benefits of access to Head Start at age four are largely absent by 1st grade for the program population as a whole.”

In the 2008 to 2009 school year, when Tennessee had to assign spaces in their early childhood education program by lottery, it created the conditions for the perfect natural experiment. Researchers found, if anything, negative effects: “the control children caught up with the pre-k participants on [kindergarten and subsequent] tests and generally surpassed them.”

There are studies out there which have found lasting benefits to test scores. But in general, the better-conducted the study, the more discouraging the results.

These results are not inconsistent with early childhood education having positive, long-term benefits for kids. Rather, they strongly suggest that the mechanism by which kids’ future outcomes are improved is not the substantive, academic content of childcare programs (which can be tweaked through staff education), but something else.

Perhaps the benefits come from teachers’ nurturing and close attention. Maybe it is being removed from chaotic homes, also enabling parents to work consistently, that helps kids from low-income families. It could simply be the freedom to play, explore, and socialize with other kids all day. Regardless, the benefits seem to be social, not academic. As millions of American parents prove every year, it is indeed possible to create a nurturing, healthy, and stimulating environment for young children without having a college degree.

Unfortunately, the case for additional childcare worker credentialing rests primarily on the idea that it is the academic content of early childhood education that helps kids in the long run. If teachers are more well-read in history or Shakespeare², the thinking goes, or are equipped with certain expert-approved classroom exercises, maybe they’ll be better prepared to impart their knowledge to kids and improve their test scores permanently. Yet none of that seems to matter. Head Start teachers’ educational credentials and curriculum choices are “not correlated with better outcomes.”

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Nevertheless, the nation’s capital of degree inflation persists. Teachers will take out loans and dutifully attend their gen-ed history courses, evidence of relevance to two-year-olds notwithstanding. If you’re like me and plan on sticking around, you’d better start saving now.

1. Yes, part of this gap comes from the fact that D.C. is entirely a large urban area, while states all have lower-cost rural and suburban areas, too.

2. We should all be reading more Shakespeare and history—and fewer tweets—regardless of what government mandates.